Embodiments of the inventive concept relate generally to electronic memory technologies. More particularly, embodiments of the inventive concept relate to bootable volatile memory devices, memory modules and processing systems comprising the bootable volatile memory devices, and methods of booting processing systems using the bootable volatile memory devices.
A processor in a processing system performs a boot procedure by reading bootstrap code from a nonvolatile memory, such as a flash memory or a read-only memory (ROM), executing the bootstrap code to initialize a volatile memory, copying boot code to the volatile memory, and executing the boot code from the volatile memory.
Although the volatile memory is used to read and write data in a boot procedure, the volatile memory does not store booting information such as the bootstrap code. Accordingly, to boot the processing system, the processor must access the nonvolatile memory in which the bootstrap code is stored before accessing the volatile memory. However, because the time required to access a nonvolatile memory is generally much longer than that required to access a volatile memory, accessing the nonvolatile memory can pose a performance bottleneck for the boot procedure.